Sleight of hand: Adoring Filmmaker Makes us see a Donald Trump who Doesn’t Exist
DIRECTED BY DINESH D’SOUZA, DEBBIE D’SOUZA, BRUCE SCHOOLEY
In his latest documentary, author and conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza strives to portray the Donald Trump who is adored by his many supporters.
Not the man vilified by the radical leftists who seek to destroy everything he stands for and everything he’s trying to build, mind you. D’Souza wants to show us the Trump who loves our country dearly and has sacrificed so much to Make America Great Again!
This is what D’Souza presents in Vindicating Trump, which he directed with his wife, Debbie D’Souza, and with Bruce Schooley. The film premiered Sept. 27 and has grossed more than $1 million. With only a few weeks before the election, D’Souza wanted to show the Republican presidential nominee at his best — even if he had to fabricate events to do so.
D’Souza gives viewers the image of an absolute prince of a man, one who is deeply committed to his family and our country. In assessing current risks to the nation, the documentarian repeatedly refers to Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. D’Souza says the concern that Lincoln expressed in his speech of a tyrant gaining control reflects the dangers posed by Democrats, not Trump.
In D’Souza’s reinvented version of history, Trump is a strong leader committed to rooting out corruption within the U.S. government. Trump chose to leave behind the comforts of Mar-a-Lago and put himself in the crosshairs of the Democrats, who fear his ability to shake up the status quo. He merely wants to restore the American dream, which progressives have undermined with their incompetence and lawlessness.
To offer this alternative image of Trump, however, D’Souza needs to ignore reality. He distorts so many documented facts to the point where the truth of who the former president really is becomes unrecognizable.
This isn’t surprising given D’Souza’s history of embracing falsehoods and demeaning rhetoric to make partisan arguments. He said the racist-fueled riots at Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 were staged. After state officials voted against an assault weapons ban in response to the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, D’Souza said of the stunned students on Twitter: “Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs.”
Also consider his documentary 2000 Mules, released two years ago.
In it, D’Souza claimed to demonstrate how individuals were paid to generate fake ballots in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and deposit them in ballot boxes during the 2020 presidential election. Joe Biden won these states, which helped him secure enough electoral votes to defeat Trump for the presidency. D’Souza offered this as the smoking gun of widespread voter fraud that tilted the election in Biden’s favor.
But those pesky facts got in the way of D’Souza’s tidy narrative. Examining his “evidence,” several news organizations found his claims dubious. The Associated Press reported May 3, 2022, that the film’s assertions are “based on faulty assumptions, anonymous accounts and improper analysis of cellphone location data, which is not precise enough to confirm that somebody deposited a ballot into a drop box, according to experts.”
Salem Media Group, which distributed the movie, found it could no longer stand by the project’s accuracy. Earlier this year, the company settled a lawsuit filed by a Georgia resident accused in the film of placing fraudulent ballots into a ballot box. Salem Media Group disavowed the movie and pulled it from distribution.
In Vindicating Trump, D’Souza referred to 2000 Mules a few times. He said that film showed what happened in 2020 and that the evidence presented in his new movie shows how it could happen. Neither assertion is true.
He interviews two reported authorities on election fraud. They outline how blank ballots can be purchased, copied with the names of candidates, signed using the names of non-active registered voters, and deposited in ballot drop-off boxes or left in polling places before votes are counted.
These individuals make highly questionable claims about how fraudulent ballots could be inserted into the vote counting process. I didn’t catch their names when I saw the film, and I cannot find them identified anywhere online. So there’s no way to determine who they are or what expertise they supposedly have to analyze fraudulent election practices.
These two men repeatedly offer broad statements on how fraudulent ballots could be counted toward a particular candidate. OK, where exactly can this be done?
Have they tried to carry this out? Did they inspect every single polling place in every single community in every single state during an election? If not, how can they presume such actions would succeed anywhere?
So D’Souza’s claims about voting fraud occurring in certain states and how it could be done are doubtful. But let’s give the man his due. When it comes to corrupting the electoral process, D’Souza knows his stuff.
He pleaded guilty in 2014 to one count of making illegal campaign contributions during the 2012 election. He reportedly steered $20,000 in illegal contributions to Wendy Long, a U.S. Senate candidate representing New York State, reportedly using the names of other people.
The government said that D’Souza donated $10,000 to Long under his name and that of his wife; in 2012, the Federal Election Campaign Act limited donations from an individual to a candidate to $5,000. He also persuaded an associate and the associate’s intimate partner to donate the same amount of money to Long; D’Souza reimbursed them in cash, the government said. He was sentenced to five years’ probation, eight months incarceration in a halfway house and assessed a $30,000 fine.
And guess which president gave this convicted felon a full and unconditional pardon for his criminal behavior in 2018! No wonder D’Souza twists the truth to make Trump — another convicted felon — look good.
D’Souza isn’t the only one signing the GOP presidential candidate’s praises in Vindicating Trump. He interviews Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee; and Alina Habba, one of Trump’s attorneys.
They both attested to Trump’s character and desire to see the United States return to its former glory. And D’Souza interviews Trump himself, who says he’s accepted the duty of trying to Make America Great Again even with all its hardships. What a trooper!
What we don’t get in D’Souza’s documentary is the Trump who mocked a disabled journalist, who’s repeatedly demeaned members of the military, who lies so frequently that it’s hard to tell if he knows how to distinguish falsehoods from the truth — and who abused the authority of his office to overturn the results of a legitimate election in a quest to cling to power. That Trump doesn’t come into focus.
In a passing reference to the Jan. 2, 2021, phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, D’Souza defended Trump’s tactics. It’s not like Trump asked anyone to come up with fraudulent ballots for him, D’Souza said.
Actually, that’s precisely what Trump suggested. At one point, he said to Raffensperger and the others on the line: “So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You know, we have that in spades already or we can keep it going.”
During the call, Trump made numerous assertions that have since been debunked. So the evidence of widespread voter fraud that he’s continued to claim took place has not been produced because it never existed. Therefore, Georgia officials can’t skew the vote total in Trump’s favor by tossing out more than 11,000 ballots for Biden — they’re legitimate.
So how else would Trump overtake Biden in the vote total? By “finding” more than 11,000 votes for him that weren’t previously counted (because they never existed). Remember what Trump said: “You know, we have that in spades already or we can keep it going.”
Or we can keep it going. Keep what going? Manufacturing phony ballots?
So we don’t get the Trump who decided that he alone was qualified to decide who won the 2020 election and not the voters. We don’t get the Trump who thumbed his nose at the foundation of our constitutional republic: representative democracy.
We don’t get the Trump who used lies to whip his radical supporters into a frenzy, thus inciting them to attack members of Congress in a violent attempt to have their head of government installed rather than the one selected by American voters. We also don’t get the Trump who sat on his keister for several hours watching television while his partisan mob carried out the insurrection and did nothing — NOTHING! — to protect legislators.
White House staff members said Trump was excited to see what was going on. He now says that he plans to pardon the “hostages” who have faced criminal prosecution if he’s re-elected. Yep, Trump is on the side of treason.
In addition, D’Souza glosses over the novel coronavirus pandemic. There’s one brief discussion about the crisis, but that was only to speak to Trump’s concern about the situation. He said Trump knew he’d be criticized in an election year for shutting down significant portions of the economy, but he went along with it anyway. How noble!
We don’t get the Trump who kept lying to Americans by saying the government had the virus under control and that one day it would simply “disappear.” We don’t get the Trump who whined publicly about the amount of testing going on to determine the scope of infection, grousing about this was making him look bad.
We don’t get the Trump who advised Americans to drink disinfectant to kill the virus if they had it. We don’t get the Trump who warned governors that they better be “nice” to him if they wanted to obtain the essential supplies to combat the spread of infection on the frontlines. And we don’t get the Trump who said he takes no responsibility for anything that went wrong with the government’s response to the emergency.
What D’Souza presents is a sanitized Trump who’s not real. This is infuriating but not surprising. Trump wallows in conspiracies and peddles falsehoods all the time, so why shouldn’t we expect his deluded supporters to do the same?
